The killer app probably depends on your usage. As an architect, I'm interested in seeing something like the Oculus Rift combined with 3d modeling apps like Rhinoceros. Being able to actually stick your head into your models would be a huge advance in getting to understand the feel of a space.

So it's more like "Baby's first handgun?" Let's hope we survive our first "test" here.

This is a very good point. Homes, individually, don't take too much power, so powering each one of them with it's own generator (solar or otherwise) is redundant and expensive. Maintenance, too, is a pain for the average home owner. So centralizing power generation is great, for the most part. At least until you start factoring in transmission loss. What ideally will happen, and this will take time thanks to the cooperation it requires, is that district power plants will spring up. That a commercial building can produce so much power that it can sell the rest to local houses. You're starting to see this happen, and in the future, hopefully it will happen more. There's other benefits to this approach as well. Say, for instance, you run a massive server farm. This farm produces a lot of heat, and if you can capture this heat, you could use it to power your building and perhaps other neighboring buildings as well. It's an idea that's catching on in Europe and a few places in the US. So maybe solar power on your home isn't going to become viable, but that doesn't mean solar won't be in your future.

You know, sometimes even the Koch funded studies turn up something surprising: http://www.businessinsider.com/koch-brothers-funded-study-proves-climate-change-2012-7.

Yeah... and I didn't help myself for not fully reading their comment. Read the article and not the comments, I should be banned, right?

No where in the article does it say they are looking directly at the camera. And if you look at the photos they are showing, you should automatically realize that the viewer is looking away from the camera (presumably at the screen displaying the other person's face), and the image is adjusted to give the illusion that the viewer is looking into the camera (thus achieving digital eye contact). Come on folks, this is Slashdot. We used to be smart. Let's bring that back.

Cultural objections: The moon is something that everyone on earth sees, and you're right, it's in a vacuum. It's (on our time frame) unchanging. Have you ever seen how terrible our clear cut forests look? Imagine if you looked up at the moon and saw nothing but tracks and the left over garbage of years of helium-3 farming. There's something impressive about seeing man's alteration of nature on that grand of a scale, but we lose out on the pure grandness of something that we, for the most part, haven't corrupted yet.

Buddy, i am an architect. i spent years drafting in school and lament that we don't draft today. we don't draft because it is archaic, although we still sketch. the big thing you are missing is that drafting is a hard line drawing, meticulously constructed with rulers, parallel guides, circle templates, triangles, and a mess of other guides that help control your lines. we don't draw in mid air. even painters had a canvas to press against.

Can we please stop with the karma whoring that is "gorilla arm syndrome reminder"? Everyone keeps bringing this up every time a new interface is created, as if nothing new under the sun will ever work. If you want to fault this, you would probably do much better questioning the ability of a user to create refined designs on the level of rocket science with just his hands floating in mid air. There's nothing to press against, nothing to provide feedback. That would require very intricate control indeed.

The fact that you have to learn how to produce these patterns makes me wonder what would happen if you "attached" these to a very young infant. From what I have read, their brains are wiring themselves based off of responses to their actions. I wonder if the thought controlled robot could become an extension of their own body if they are introduced to it at a very young age. I imagine it's harder to learn to control these actions once your brain has a basic understanding of what does what, hence the learning curve.

I was fortunate enough to see all the work that these guys are pursuing (there's some really fun energy monitoring that they've developed, using only a single device to monitor a whole house). From what it sounds like, the sensing systems are very low resolution, useful for exactly what you said. Is something there and how big is it? As the system is just noticing a flux in energy when your hand interacts with the field given off by the monitor, they (when they spoke with us a few months ago) said it seemed unlikely.

Fun fact though, they've used the same technology to monitor the fields generated by the lights in a room, so you can actually gain a picture of movement in the room based off of only the flux in the lights' power draws. Again, this is very low resolution, but you don't always need every system to be high res.

Buildings don't get bombed that often, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it to do so. All major government buildings are required to have blast resistant exteriors, and other facilities, such as factories often have blast resistant materials because, well, things sometimes explode unexpectedly. The point of the blast resistance is entirely there to protect the person. You want to minimize the amount of shrapnel that occurs when the material is hit by a strong force. In this case, with the foam, it could help disperse the force of blast, resulting in less damage, less shrapnel, and hopefully less structural damage.

As for demolition - buildings are gutted before demolition. There's a lot of scrap material that can be recycled or reused. There's also a lot of material that you don't want being blown out of the building when the charges go off. So a good portion of the demo work is stripping the building down to its structure. Blast proof material would be removed for many reasons, but in particular, you wouldn't want to mess with the precise calculations that go into dropping a building straight down.

I'll second this. I'm currently in grad school for architecture, and we use a ton of maker-space-esque tools. We have laser cutters, cnc mills, cnc plasmacutters, a waterjet cutter, 3d printers, and now a cnc fabric cutter, and Rhino's the tool of choice to design in here. It also has a ton of free plug ins that expand its power. Grasshopper's a great visual scripting tool if you're into parametric design (I'm not exactly sold on this yet), and through Grasshopper, you can use Firefly. Firefly is a plugin for Grasshopper that lets you talk to microcontrollers/other networks/webcams, and use the data to drive design. I just finished up a project where we used firefly to prototype a mechanical louver system to be controlled by Arduino, which was then fabricated on a laser cutter. It's a good tool, and very easy to learn.

... Scientists discovered jogging?

then let me explain a bit more. First off, I was writing with passion, which left me saying things less clearly than I would have liked to. As for the situation - I was offered a job with the school's research branch over the summer. It was a work study job that is paid partially through governement funds. Basically, the school pays half of what I get paid, and the government foots the other half of the bill. This is great for the school, and works for the student - most of the time. During the summer, a full time work study position is paid out of the total amount of money you can take out for loans. So the money I was gaining over the summer was money that was being directly removed from fall quarter's funds. Upon reaching fall quarter, I was surprised to find that my loans wouldn't cover tuition, even though I was paying far less now that I had a few waivers this year. I then found out about the summer work study issue. So I asked them to increase my loans to the maximum, in order to just pay tuition, and found that at that point, I had only 200 dollars left per month to pay for the basics - rent, food, school supplies. This was a bit of a shock. Thankfully, there's a very good work study advisor here who found every last dime I could make. This left me with around 600 a month, which was fine, but my rent, although low comparatively, would leave me with 50 dollars left to pay for everything else. That's when I found out from another student that this happened to them last year. I spoke with the school about it, and then found out that, according to the state's rules, I qualify. I had no intention of scamming the system, I simply explained my situation. In their words - "that's great, you're the person we'd like to help because you'll help us as soon as you're out of school again making money" And they are right.

So that's the story. I had back up options. My IRA's still cranking along, but the money in there is money I cannot touch without stiff penalties. And if you wonder why I would avoid touching that money now, you don't understand the goals of saving. I'll need it more when I'm older. I have a strong family, but with my age, and with my parents reaching retirement (and having suffered from the stockmarket crash), I felt burdening them was a last resort, used only when I was out of other options. I'm still working with the research group, as that money, although still counting against my maximum loans, is money i will not have to pay back. This issue came out of left field, and I was left frantically searching for any financial help i could find. I took the help of a program that's set up for just that event.

One final side note. I found out after I applied for the stamps that my parents, too, had lived off them when my older siblings were young. My father was in grad school too at the time. Although I've never asked how much my father makes, I'm starting to realize that during his best years, I would imagine he'd be up closer to the top 2%. Don't quote me on this. I bring this up because my family is exactly the type of people that you want. People willing to work, to succeed, to do what needs to be done. And we aren't looking for hand outs. But there are times when we need to seek out help. In our case, we took advantage of the programs that were available to us, rather than to burden our families who have spent so much time and money already helping us get to where we are. Either way, it's asking for help. And in my father's case, he repaid both his family and his country ten fold. It's every bit my intention to do the same.

So with that said, lumping everyone in the bottom half into poor planners, lazy workers, and idiotic fools drives me up a wall. That's a ton of hard working people that are being written off as entitled freeloaders. It's, admittedly, this stereotyping that makes me want to immediately respond with a call to eat the rich. that's not helping either.